Aristophanes' Clouds: themes and analysis

¶ … repeatedly, and indeed many of us believe to be true, that there is nothing new under the sun, it is nevertheless always a little startling to find that issues that we consider to be thoroughly modern have in fact been being discussed for thousands of years. This is the case when one reads Aristophanes's The Clouds, which is a very witty indictment of new educational ideas in vogue during his lifetime in Athens.

What makes this work so entertaining - other than the language itself, which we can appreciate even in translation - is the fact Aristophanes has a gift for allowing us to see the real silliness of the ways in which education and pedagogy are politicized. This play is not simply a debate about the best way in which to teach the youth of Athens. Rather, it is about how different groups holding power in Athenian society can gain power and status for themselves (and the other aspects of their political agenda) by promoting various educational programs that will favor them.

This is, of course, exactly what happens today. People who want schools to teach only about abstinence and not about birth control are interested not only in this particular aspect of school curricula but also about pressing a socially and politically conservative agenda in general - and are using the cover of pedagogical reform to do so. Likewise, those who wish to see conflict-resolution taught in schools are not simply interested in helping students learn how to minimize conflicts and arguments in the hallways but are interested in promoting a range of politically progressive causes.

While education is, of course, important, it is also important to remember that educational policy is simply politics - and sometimes war - by other means. Because of the specificity of the comments in the play about the advocates of particular educational philosophies as well as because of the similarities between the politico-educational situation that Aristophanes is describing and our own political situation three weeks before an important election, I believe that Aristophanes intended his play to be an indictment of the general level of immaturity that existed in the adults who were overseeing the education of the youth of Athens.

This is not intended to be an abstract commentary on something that might happen in some society somewhere else but rather a specific description of (and in many ways a discrediting of as well) specific elements of Athenian society. I am quite sure that those people who were sitting in the audience listening to the play when it was first performed were aware of the dynamics of the way in which the play reflected the politics of the day and knew precisely to whom Aristophanes was referring.

It is perhaps important to take a moment here to note that although we moderns tend to think first of tragedy when we think about Greek theater (this may well result from the fact that most of the Greek plays that are performed today are in fact tragedies) the comedic plays and satirical plays such as this one were as essential a part of Greek theater as were the tragic plays. While considered in a different class from tragedy, comedy was not dismissed as unimportant or unworthy - in large part because comedic plays were associated with the Dionysian rites.

As a result, as Jepsen (1983) argues, no Greek poet or playwright could make his reputation unless he could satire as well as dabble in high tragedy. Both Aristophanes as a writer and the members of his audience would thus have taken comedy seriously in a way that we often do not. This is not comedy like "I Love Lucy" - even if the plots do tend to hang on improbably complications involving lover, families and money and the characters were stock creations even in Aristophanes's time. Rather, this is comedy like "Saturday Night Live," essentially topical political humor about one's own society. Comedy only worked, within the context of the Old Comedy plays that Aristophanes was writing, when the but of most of the jokes were currently recognizable political and cultural leaders.

Aristophanes himself lived during the time of the great conflict of the Peloponnesian War (which ran from 431 to 404 BCE) and much of his humor was directed at the leaders of Athens who kept his country so continually at war. As a part of his general distrust of the way in which Athens was being run - by men who could speak well in public but who often had very little to back up their words - he was also concerned with the rise of the Sophist movement and the effect of this movement on educational ideals, as the commentary on the play in this edition suggests.

The Sophists - we derive from the name of their movement the critical English term "sophistry" - were interested in the use of argument for its own sake, fascinated by the rhetorical ability to split hairs regardless of the reality behind the argument. Aristophanes was suspicious of such men, perhaps hearing in their stance a justification for the rhetorically pretty and compelling - but dangerous - warmongering of Athenian leaders. (Again, we may draw comparisons to our own times if we are so inclined.)

We see numerous comments on - and sometimes outright condemnations of - the Sophistry of the times and the ways in which ideas about the importance of brilliant argumentation were overtaking substantive soundness in passage like this one, in which Strepsiades is speaking to Phidippides:

It seems they have two courses of reasoning, the true and the false, and that, thanks to the false, the worst law-suits can be gained. If then you learn this science, which is false, I shall not have to pay an obolus of all the debts I have contracted on your account.